Cause for Alarm

We just had a scary experience. Martina was napping and I was trying to figure out how to unlock the number pad for our front door. The doors here are different, in that we don’t have the traditional jagged metal to unlock our door. Here we have a magnet, as in the picture above, that we fit into a slot on the outside of our door. Blue lights flash if this is the right key (I’m not joking about this) and the door unlocks itself. Once you close the door, it automatically locks itself after three seconds.

Back to the story – I was trying to get to the number pad on this door (I don’t know what the pad is for. I was just told to change my code by Martina’s co-teacher) when I pushed a button that I thought would do the job. Instead, it set off a high pitch siren, like a car alarm. We fiddled around with it for a few minutes before Martina, rudely awoken by the siren, knocked on our neighbor’s door to ask for help. He told us we need the key to stop the wailing of the alarm. Once we did that, we chatted for a few minutes outside our apartment doors, though the chatting consisted of no more than two ideas: where do you teach? My daughter goes to this school. We couldn’t understand each other, and the man’s daughter, who took English at her school, was too shy to help. She just stood at the front door and awkwardly stared.

Anyhow, we plan on showing you our place in video soon. We just need to charge the battery for the camera. It’s dead, and we have only one plug adapter, which is charging too many other things instead.